With the departure of two top AI researchers, Google (Alphabet), which once formed the "AI Big Three" with OpenAI and Anthropic last year, had its worst trading day in the past year on Monday. As of press time, Google has fallen more than 6%, and once fell more than 7% during the day.


(Source: TradingView)

The direct cause of the crash wasIt seems that John Jumper, vice president of Google DeepMind, announced that he is leaving Google and joining its main competitor Anthropic.. Jiang Bo once won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with DeepMind CEO Jamis Hassabis for creating AlphaFold, an AI model that can predict protein structures.


(On December 10, 2024, local time, Stockholm, Sweden, John Jungper showed his medal)

Also last week,Noam Shazeer, vice president of engineering at Google Deepmind, also announced his resignation on social media and joined OpenAI to be responsible for artificial intelligence architecture research..

Shakir was a co-author of the legendary 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need," which described the transformer architecture that forms the basis of today's generative AI.

Due to Google's slowness in integrating generative AI into its products, Shaqir left his job in 2021 to found chatbot startup Character.AI. In 2024, Google re-recruited Shakir through a licensing agreement worth US$2.5 billion and gave him the responsibility of co-leading the development of the Gemini AI model.

With two soul figures running away from competitors in a row, it’s no wonder that the market has some bad guesses about “what happened to Google.”

at the same time,From a product perspective, in 2026, when Anthropic and OpenAI are competing on the “AI agent” track, Google’s presence is quite thin..

Last week, media quoted former Google employees as saying that Google has been "difficult" to sell AI programming tools to enterprises.

At the end of last year, with the release of Gemini 3, Google was once widely regarded as the leader in the field of AI. However, in the field of AI programming tools and productivity, the company has never been able to come up with competitive products. At the annual I/O developer conference held in the middle of last month, Google launched a number of products including Gemini 3.5 Flash model and Spark AI agent, but failed to stimulate significant market response.

As the momentum in the AI ​​competition weakens, the negative impact of large-scale investment in AI will be difficult to suppress. Since October last year,Alphabet has raised $141 billion in debt and equity.

At the same time, rival Microsoft seems intent on provoking an "AI price war."

Microsoft CEO Nadella publicly criticized the situation of "AI overlords devouring the economy" last weekend. He said that "a handful of companies" are seizing the value of this technology, while making dire predictions about security risks and unemployment, claiming that they will require huge resources to achieve unlimited expansion, and predicting that "the public will not tolerate only a few models and companies doing all the learning for the world."

Microsoft launched Copilot Cowork agent AI last week, claimingCompared with Claude Cowork, the cost per prompt is 30~40% cheaper on average. There are also rumors that Microsoft is considering hosting top open source model-driven agent products such as DeepSeek to further significantly reduce costs.